Rebels Pull Back as Syrian Military Continues Moving In on Aleppo

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Rebel fighters in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, said Wednesday that government forces had opened a ground assault, forcing them to pull back from parts of the city because their ammunition was running low, as new disputes arose around the contentious issue of foreign military support for President Bashar al-Assad, and for the opposition.

In Aleppo, several rebel commanders said shelling and bomb attacks early Wednesday had reached new levels of intensity.

Residents reported receiving ominous cellphone text messages asking them to cooperate with the government. One text, signed by the Syrian Army, read: “Dear brothers, informing about terrorists means you are saving yourself and your family.”

Both the opposition and Syrian state television said the Syrian military had tried to reclaim the strategic neighborhood of Salaheddiin, where much of the fighting has been concentrated.

A rebel commander identified as Abu Mohammed, chief of the insurgent Shahbaa Brigade in Aleppo, said in a telephone interview that the fight with loyalist soldiers would apparently be long because of an ammunition shortage among the insurgent fighters, which meant they had to stage a tactical retreat pending further supplies. He said their daily needs included at least 60 rocket-propelled grenades, often used against armored vehicles, to counter a buildup of government forces, including tanks and snipers, in Salaheddiin, a neighborhood in the city’s southwest corner.

Other commanders spoke of a significant buildup by government troops near the southern edge of the city, which is Syria’s commercial heart.

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An empty street in Aleppo on Wednesday.Credit
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Syrian state television reported Wednesday that the army had already reclaimed Salaheddiin, seizing ammunition caches and killing several “terrorists” — the government’s term for the armed opposition — while arresting others, including fighters from unidentified countries.

Rebels said troops had already moved into parts of the area. But broader suggestions that a long-awaited ground offensive had begun against the rebels could not be independently confirmed.

The developments coincided with contradictory reports involving the role of other countries in Syria’s conflict.

In Jordan, the state news agency reported that Syria’s prime minister, Riyad Farid Hijab, had completed his widely reported defection by arriving in Jordan early Wednesday morning — not Monday, as Jordanian officials and Syrian rebels and activists had all initially reported. A Syrian activist at the border also said in an interview that Mr. Hijab crossed on Wednesday, but Col. Malik al-Kurdi, a deputy commander for the Free Syrian Army, which arranged Mr. Hijab’s departure, disputed that account.

“He was in a bordering town inside Jordan, a tribal area,” Mr. Kurdi said. “He had some cousins there, and he did not approach the official authorities until today.”

Analysts said Jordan might have been deceived or uncertain in its response because it has tried to stay out of the conflict.

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Men searched for bodies under the rubble of a house destroyed in an airstrike in a village north of Aleppo on Wednesday.Credit
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

“They did not take a position on the first day of the defection because they were scared of a reaction,” said Talal Atrissi, a Lebanese political analyst. “They might also have been protecting him for security reasons.”

Disputed accounts also arose regarding the identities of dozens of Iranian hostages seized in Syria over the weekend and an equally contentious assertion by the insurgents that they had killed a Russian general acting as a military adviser to forces around the capital, Damascus.

A rebel group calling itself the Hawks Special Operations Battalion said in a video posted on YouTube that it had “eliminated” the Russian, Gen. Vladimir Petrovich Kochyev. The video showed what the rebels said was a copy of an identity card issued by the Russian military. The Russian news media denied the rebel claim, quoting the general as saying he was in Moscow.

It was not clear whether the competing narratives were part of the broader propaganda war between Damascus and its adversaries that has burgeoned in the information vacuum created by restrictions on independent reporting.

Russia, which has a naval refueling station in the Syrian port of Tartus, is Mr. Assad’s biggest international sponsor, while Iran is his main regional ally.

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, had told Iranian reporters that “some” of the Iranian hostages in Syria seized last weekend were retired members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. But, he was quoted as saying, “Their appearance and clothes and documents show they are honest pilgrims.”

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Men carry the body of a boy killed in a recent air strike in a village north of Aleppo, Syria, on Wednesday.Credit
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Iran has insisted that the captives are religious pilgrims, while their captors say they were on a military mission.

Hours later, an unidentified Foreign Ministry official denied the minister’s reported remarks on Iran’s Arabic-language state television channel, Al Alam.

Confusion also accompanied official Iranian announcements of a conference on Syria to be convened Thursday in Tehran. The semiofficial Fars News Agency quoted Hussein Amir Abdollahian, the deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, as saying “a remarkable number of interested and influential regional and world states” were sending emissaries.

But less than 24 hours before the conference was to begin, Iran had not disclosed which countries would be represented. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Twitter that “if the meeting takes place, Russia will be represented by its ambassador to Iran.”

At the United Nations, France announced that it was organizing a ministerial-level meeting for members of the Security Council on Aug. 30, “examining the humanitarian situation in Syria and neighboring countries.”

In Washington, John O. Brennan, the Obama administration’s counterterrorism adviser, suggested that it was reviewing the possibility of establishing a no-fly zone in northern Syria. Other administration officials have suggested there is no appetite for such an intervention.

“These are things the United States government has been looking at very carefully, trying to understand the implications and trying to understand the advantages and disadvantages of this,” Mr. Brennan said in response to a question during a forum of the Council on Foreign Relations. Asked if a no-fly zone was “a nonstarter,” Mr. Brennan said, “I don’t recall the president ever saying that anything was off the table.”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell from London, Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Ellen Barry from Moscow, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, Rick Gladstone from New York, and Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan.

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2012, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Rebels Pull Back as Syrian Military Continues Moving In on Aleppo. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe